Immigrants Don’t Take Jobs Away From Americans, Fed Study Finds

Aug. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Immigration has no “significant”
effect on the number of jobs available to U.S.-born workers and
helps boost incomes and productivity over time, according to a
paper by an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San
Francisco.

“There is no evidence that immigrants crowd out U.S.-born
workers in either the short or long run,” Giovanni Peri, an
associate professor at the University of California-Davis and a
visiting scholar at the San Francisco Fed, said in the paper
released today. “Data show that, on net, immigrants expand the
U.S. economy’s productive capacity, stimulate investment, and
promote specialization that in the long run boosts
productivity.”

Immigrants, who tend to be less educated and lack English-language skills, allow U.S.-born workers with similar levels of
education to shift toward more communications-intensive jobs,
which generally pay better, Peri said. Also, a growing workforce
prompts companies to expand and upgrade equipment, making the
economy more productive, he said.

An inflow of immigrants equal to 1 percent of the increase
in employment helps boost overall incomes by 0.6 percent to 0.9
percent, according to Peri’s research. That means that
immigration pushed wages up by $5,100 on average from 1990 to
2007 after adjusting for inflation, accounting for 20 percent to
25 percent of the gain during those years, he said.

The paper comes as U.S. hiring shows signs of cooling. A
Labor Department report on Sept. 3 may show that private payroll
rose by 47,000 this month after a 71,000 gain in July, and the
unemployment rate rose to 9.6 percent, according to the median
forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.